Perhaps not enough words or maybe not the right words, exists to explain what is in my heart and on my mind.
Last Friday, Norine, our landlady and next door neighbor called with very distressing news. She said that she had just received a call from a sheriff in Montana that Dale, her husband, had been missing since two-thirty the day before.
I continued what I was doing in disbelief, hoping that the idea that it was a hoax would be found by her son. But there was a tug on my heart and I thought of the night before when Dirt could not sleep and was up out of bed wandering around most of the night.
We stood helplessly by as we watched Dale’s wife and children be tortured with not knowing, wondering where he was, what happened. Saturday my daughter came across the yard with the news. Dale was gone. An ATV accident while hunting in Montana.
Dear reader I cannot express to you how my heart is terribly heavy with selfish desires that this last weekend would disappear from the records of time. I know that Dale was not alone when he fell down into the ravine where they found his body. I know that he is where he longed to be, where those who have faith in the saving grace of Christ Jesus all long to be. So it is my selfishness that desires that Dale would have had more time on earth, with us, his wife, his children, grandchildren, my children, my husband and myself.
It is my selfishness that yearns to hear him shout for his dogs, to ride up to our house on his ATV, to call Dirt away from the house to help him fix a tractor or some electronic gadget, to call and ask for my daughters to work for him. It is my selfishness that begs for people to stay where they are, to not change, to not loose the friends I have, the people in my life.
